


the winter of the asteroid

by magistrate



Category: White Collar
Genre: AU - Asteroid Impact, AU - Global Catastrophe, AU - Impact Winter, Cold Weather, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Post-apocalyptic puppy pile, Soft Post-apocalypse, Winter, bed sharing, cutest apocafic ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 08:52:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1339477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/pseuds/magistrate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for Love_82's Collar Corner prompt, having to do with characters cuddling for warmth. Somehow drifted to include an asteroid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the winter of the asteroid

**Author's Note:**

> Love_82's prompt was:
>
>>   
> Prompt/Request: Inspired by a picture I saw of the characters from another TV show all sleeping on the same bed together. The WC team, Diana, Neal and Jones all end up sleeping in the same bed. For comfort, warmth, drinking after a bad case and they are passed out, the hotel only has one bed available. Whatever reason you want.
>> 
>> Characters: Neal, Diana and Jones. Anyone else you want or need.
>> 
>> I Would Like: Friendship, banter. I would love Peter coming in and finding them at one point. Bonus points for snuggling. 
>> 
>> I was going to say nothing too serious but if the prompt takes you that way that is fine. You can make it angsty, fluffy, humorous.
>> 
>> I Don't Want: Nothing that I can think of.
> 
> This slid a bit from the prompt – Neal and Peter stole the show, like they do, and I apparently saw "nothing too serious" and interpreted it as "mass extinction event via impact winter", and plus, it's low on banter. But, um, fic? 

Peter wakes because Elizabeth, at his side, has pulled closer and is shivering. Not a good sign. He's not exactly warm, himself, but the smothering pile of blankets on top of them is keeping enough heat in, and between Elizabeth and Satchmo somewhere on his legs and Diana curled at the small of his back, there's enough human and animal warmth to get him comfortable enough for sleep.

Not, apparently, enough for everyone. He frowns, then stretches a hand over Elizabeth's back.

His hand encounters empty space and cold mattress. _Oh._ As he thought, then: Neal is gone.

He groans, and pulls himself up, which disturbs everyone. Satchmo makes a plaintive noise, Elizabeth rouses and murmurs "Hon?", and Diana seems to come full awake – that, or she was awake before he was, drifting above the surface of dreams. On her other side, Jones gives a longsuffering sigh.

"Sorry," Peter mumbles, and does his best to shift Satchmo off onto Elizabeth and Elizabeth off onto Diana, and the first fingers of the brutal cold air find him like a threat.

"Caffrey scarpered, didn't he?" Jones says, half-awake and half-annoyed. Still, have to hand it to the FBI: there are only so many reasons Peter would be dragging himself away from the warmth of the pile, and Jones caught it in one.

"He's going to freeze to death," Peter grumbles, and extracts himself into the room, where the cold air closes around him like a fist.

He finds the heavy coat by touch, and the heavy snow pants, and the heavy boots, the heavy cap, heavy gloves, and all of them are cold and just make him feel forty pounds more weighed down. Moving in this getup feels like moving in a spacesuit. But then, he'd actually freeze less quickly, in outer space.

There's a kettle of ice hooked up to the generator, and he _could_ fill a hot water bottle and tuck it under his coat. But if he's going to be out long enough that he'll need it, it'll be because this turned into a manhunt. He'd rather avoid that. He just says "Shouldn't be long," and tromps his way to the door.

Outside, the snow has drifted, but there's already an arc where the door has pushed it away. Footsteps, too, on the stairs leading up. They've chosen Jones' place for their winter HQ because it's about as much basement as they're likely to get; the thermal mass of the surrounding earth doesn't do a lot for them, but it's better than nothing.

Out here, exposed to the snow and the sky, Peter wishes he'd grabbed a visor; his _eyelids_ hurt in the cold.

"Neal?" he calls. His voice glides through the indifferent air.

Thankfully: "Up here," Neal calls, and Peter hauls himself and the weight of all this winter gear up to the street, where Neal is a formless lump in the darkness, leaning against a skeletal tree.

 _He_ had the sense to take a visor, Peter sees. His breath is ghosting on the lower third of the curved plastic, little fingers of frost beginning to web their way across. And, like an idiot, Neal's sitting directly on the curb.

And, like an idiot, Peter grumps up and sits down beside him. Neal turns, and there's not enough light on the street to see past the visor; there are only a few houses, here and there, with generators running, fuel rationed out to keep grow lamps glowing, a prayer for food and oxygen against the sky dark with impact clouds. As for the tree Neal's leaning against, Peter wonders if it's alive or dead. Maybe even in this winter of the asteroid, life is humming beneath its surface, waiting – as it would, in any other winter – for the sun to return, the air to warm, for its life-giving leaves to spread.

Peter wonders, if it is still alive, how long it'll wait for that spring.

"Did I wake you?" Neal asks, sounding apologetic. Peter huffs.

"You absconded," he pronounces, "with a minimum of 250 BTUs per hour of body heat. I should arrest you for that."

"I'm pretty sure the Federal government can't commandeer my _body heat_ ," Neal says. Yeah, emergency provisions mean they can commandeer all sorts of things, and they can make strongly-worded suggestions as to how their work units should survive the nights, but he's got a point. When day comes, with its sluggish, ashy light, he's required to go out with the rest of them to check on the state of the city. Make sure no one's threatening the growers or selling food on the black market, make sure resources are getting to where they need to be, make sure civilization hasn't collapsed any further than it's already collapsed. But his nights are still, ostensibly, his own.

"What are you doing out here?" Peter asks.

Neal sits on that, for a while, then waves one hand skyward. "Wishing that the clouds would clear," he says.

Peter snorts. _Aren't we all_ , is on his tongue.

"I've never seen New York this dark," Neal says, and that's true of all of them. "I want to see the stars, when they come out."

A pang of longing goes through Peter, too. Memories of nights in his childhood, upstate and away from the city's lights, picking out the constellations. New York City hasn't had stars in a long time, though; that's been true since before he moved here. Now, so far as he knows, stars aren't possible anywhere.

"I bet they'll be spectacular," Neal says.

"I bet they will be," Peter agrees.

They sit, a while longer, and Peter winces. He didn't take the time to gear up properly, and the cold is infiltrating through the cracks. Cold air, sharp as knives, at his wrists, his neck, his waist, his shins. The cold all but crackles in his lungs.

"You doing all right?" he asks, and Neal tilts his head.

"Mm?"

"You miss Mozzie?"

Mozzie has a somewhat disconcerting talent for rigging hydroponics setups in basements and bunkers. His labor got commandeered for one of the big ag efforts just outside the city, and it's hard to get out to see him, and it's not the kind of climate where he'll let his pigeons fly. Peter is a bit surprised he went at all; thought he'd probably have his own bunker, with food and fuel enough to last out a minor apocalypse.

Neal had aired the opinion that Mozzie had a valiant streak of his own. That when it came down to the choice between feeling vindicated in his paranoia and saving the human race, he'd be trying to save the human race.

"What do you think?" Neal says, evenly.

They still see June, time to time. Elizabeth does, more often – the organizers organizing, the logistics-minded among them keeping the rest of this operation going. She's not overseeing the district they're assigned to, but she's there for the finding in the Operations Building. Not behind a military checkpoint and a distance hard to justify on the fuel use reports.

"Maybe one of these weekends he can get down to see us," Peter says, and coughs in the dry air.

"Maybe," Neal says.

Peter stands. "Come on, Neal," he says. He's already reached his limit on the cold. "There won't be any stars tonight."

He can't see the expression on Neal's face, but he imagines one: a flicker of yearning, of blunted hope, pruned back as all his hopes are by the natural progression of the world. It's just a guess, though, and after a second Neal puts his hand up, and Peter pulls him to his feet. They go back down into the house, where they find their assigned coat-dump locations and pull of their layers of armor.

The whole rough dogpile is probably no longer asleep, but these days there's nothing for the nights _except_ to sleep, so it doesn't much matter. No cards by rationed candlelight. No easy electric lamps. Peter pulls his boots off and turns to pull up a corner of the mass of blankets.

"In," he says, and Neal's form moves inquisitively in the dark. "God knows how long you were out there. You're probably half-frozen. In."

Neal gives a long exhale, but doesn't protest. Just crawls under the covers, where Elizabeth makes a small, amused noise, and murmurs something like "Do you _enjoy_ being this cold?" as the group's human warmth envelops him.

Peter slides in afterward, holding down his side of the mattress. Really, he thinks he's probably just as frozen as Neal is – maybe more, given his own haphazard dressing; fortunately, he's never encountered one of those dire _Exposed skin freezes in X seconds_ warnings that's actually seemed to apply to him – but he has a feeling that Neal takes the edge of the mattress, night after night, just in case he needs to slip away again.

He's not worried that Neal's going to run away. Even with the tracking database down, even with his anklet removed because no one needs a heat sink sitting against their skin, gone are the days when he could hop a plane to Paris or London, gone are the days when people had the luxury of paying for a stolen Monet. Call it a protective instinct, maybe. He doesn't want Neal going out to wait for the stars alone.

From the far side of the bed, Jones's voice floats over like it's part of the dark. "How long 'til dawn?–anybody?"

Peter thinks he can feel Neal thinking _Too long_ beside him, but Diana mumbles "Probably not too long now." And that's it, really. With the stars held back by a haze of clouds and dirt, with them half-smothered by piles of blankets and tangles of limbs, it's that sort of redundancy of faith that's let their team survive.

"Catch your sleep while you can," Peter says, and waits for the Earth to turn, for the sun to fight its way to them.


End file.
